Refereeing, sandwich-making, swimming, bribing - and all before lunch. Is spending the entire summer with your children an ordeal you'd rather do without, asks Fionola Meredith.
'I love them more than life itself, so why does spending time with them drive me completely up the wall?" groans Mary (41), a self-employed mother of two boys aged 10 and 6. It's a question many parents across the country are secretly asking themselves as the long school summer holiday draws to a close.
For most parents, our children are our number one priority. We spend hours agonising over whether they eat enough vegetables, or whether they're happy at school. We're always ferrying them from drama class to swimming lessons. We proudly video their school plays and we boast about their achievements to our friends.
But when it comes down to it, do we really enjoy spending time with them? For some parents, the 24/7 childcare required by the summer holidays is an ordeal they'd rather do without.
Mary knows parents in full-time employment face their own struggles to find well-organised and affordable childcare over the summer months. "I feel bad whinging about this, actually. In many ways, I'm lucky - I work from home, so I haven't had the nightmare of finding summer childcare for my two sons. But I've found the holidays really difficult to manage. I spend my days making peanut-butter sandwiches and refereeing their constant fights. At first, I tried to stop them playing the PlayStation for hours on end, but now I've just given in. It's all having a really bad effect on me. This morning, I spent 10 minutes trying to work out what day of the week it was. It's as if I've entered some kind of weird twilight zone, where all the normal routines that keep me sane have melted away.
"I suppose I have to face the fact that I don't enjoy looking after my kids full-time. I'm swamped by their constant demands and endless squabbling. I feel a real failure, to be honest."
Maureen (35) is a teacher and mother to a girl aged five and a boy aged eight. Like Mary, she's finding it difficult to cope. "It's terrible to admit it, but I can't wait until the new school term starts. Practically speaking, it's hard to find activities that both children enjoy, and they seem to get bored so quickly. And when they're bored, they start fighting. I've been struggling to keep up with my own schedule of preparations for the new term, as well as trying to keep the kids amused, and it's got to the stage where I'm completely overwhelmed. The long summer holiday just seems to stretch out endlessly, and the thought of trying to fill every single day is really starting to panic me."
Calls to parents' advice lines rocket at this time of the year, as mums and dads pull their hair out over increased financial pressures, complicated childcare arrangements and the querulous demands of bored children. Pip Jaffa, chief executive of the Belfast-based Parents' Advice Centre, agrees that the long school holiday can be a challenging time for parents.
"Summer can be unpredictable. It's a bit like Christmas - expectations build and build about the wonderful times ahead, and eventually become completely unreal. So the reality can't measure up to the weight of the expectations. In addition, the long holiday often means that family routines change. Family members can end up spending much more time together than usual during those eight weeks, and that can lead to problems. It's hard for parents because they get very little down-time from the pressures of childcare."
If coping full-time with the competing needs of younger children leaves some parents fantasising obsessively about the first day of term in September, spare a thought for those trying to accommodate the holiday requirements of their teenage sons and daughters. Sean (55), a museum curator, is father to Kate (13) and Hugh (19). He and his wife work full-time, and although they managed to take most of July off on holiday, both of them need to be at work during August.
"I think Kate is too young to be left alone in the house, but she disagrees. The trouble is, she sees her older brother Hugh hanging out with his friends, doing exactly what he wants, and she thinks she's being treated like a baby. I tried to bribe Hugh with offers of some extra cash to keep an eye on her, but he hates being tied down at home. They have the most awful fights and end up phoning me at work to complain about each other."
Surely the worst possible summer holiday scenario is a house full of both tots and teenagers, all clamouring simultaneously for attention to their wildly divergent needs. That's the situation that full-time mother Shauna (29) found herself in when her partner's teenage children joined her own young family for the entire summer break. Shauna's partner works long hours, and Shauna is buckling under the strain of accommodating the demands of her six-year-old daughter, four-year-old son, 13-year-old step-daughter and 15-year-old stepson. But the thing that bothers her most is the mess and disorder generated by having four kids mooching around the house full-time: "There are at least six different meal-times in any given day, because the younger children operate on a totally different schedule to the teenagers. We have two sittings for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So the dishes pile up, and the washing doesn't get done because I'm too busy clearing up from the previous meal to get the machine on.
"My own younger two are getting really confused and disorientated by the chaos - and by my growing frustration! My stepchildren are decent kids, but they come from a household with an entirely different family set-up, and a lack of house rules. The mess they generate is incredible.
"Last week, I blew up at the lot of them. I'd just had enough. So now I've imposed a new regime - everybody up before eight in the morning and all meals to be taken together. The older kids don't like it, but it's a small price to pay for my sanity."
But not every parent finds the holidays a drag. Single mother Anne (29) works two days a week in a bookshop. Her daughter, Aoife (7), is cared for by Anne's mother when Anne is at work. Rather than viewing it as a period of irritating tedium, Anne relishes the opportunity to spend more time with her daughter that the summer brings.
"I don't want to sound smug, as though I'm a perfect mother, but spending time with Aoife is wonderful. She's great company, and I love organising little activities together like a picnic in the park, or a trip to the beach. Recently, we took a short holiday in Donegal: long, lazy days, late nights, getting up when we felt like it. It was really idyllic. Children need a break from structure and routine as much as adults do. I hear all these parents whinging about the length of holidays - why don't they loosen up and enjoy their kids? They won't be this age forever, after all."
Feelings of guilt and inadequacy come with the territory as parents. But maybe we're all trying too hard. Instead of exhausting and exasperating ourselves attempting to facilitate a stellar range of stimulating activities for every day of the holidays, then torturing ourselves with remorse when the kids end up watching the Pokémon video for the umpteenth time, why not just let them get bored? After whining pathetically about it for an hour or two, their own imaginations will kick in and they'll spend the rest of the day blissfully re-creating scenes from Harry Potter under the kitchen table.
You never know, you might find yourself looking forward to seeing those smiling, angelic faces when they emerge at dinnertime.